Focus

Saturday, July 23, 2011

A nice piece on finding one's voice as a writer...

http://zenhabits.net/voice/

Perhaps to share with students?

Thursday, June 30, 2011

What happens when students create their own collaboration tools?

What happens when students create their own collaboration tools?: "

I teach technology and innovation to working professional MBA students who are changing courses and teams every ten weeks. Collaboration tools are critical to our effectiveness. Over the last two years, my courses have served as testing grounds for two locally-grown, student-designed tools: Acceledge and Piazzza. These tools, as well as other student-built offerings, such as Coursekit, are the result of a growing student frustration with “old-school” collaboration.

My students come to class straight from their jobs at a variety Silicon Valley firms large and small. They are required to do team projects, and much of the team work is virtual. They tell me they have the following requirements for collaboration tools:

Privacy. While they are interested in sharing examples from work, they don’t want these examples available publicly.

Threaded/searchable Q&A with the answers coming from both students and faculty.

Ability to share relevant links and files for commentary. Basically Facebook for the classroom.

A simple, clear calendar with readings and due dates available at a glance (in other words, project management tools).

And there’s also my additional requirement: On-line quizzes with a gradebook that supports the U.S. regulations for educational privacy.

While all faculty at my university have access to Angel (a Blackboard course management system), in my classes, I’m happy to beta-test student-built tools, and I find especially interesting the simplicity offered by these solutions. An effective collaboration application is not about how many features the tool has — it’s about getting the task done.

Acceledge

This term I used Acceledge, founded by one of my students, as my main course management tool instead of Angel. It’s a custom-built tool, based on the open-source Moodle learning platform. Its simplicity is what drew me to say “yes” to the trial. Because of the customizations added on top of the Moodle base, the students only saw the features they told me they needed — there was no wiki, and no deep detail around each topic.

Piazzza

Pooja Nath, Founder and CEO of Piazza, was still an MBA student at Stanford when she approached me two years ago about trying her Q&A tool. From the Piazza site:

I started Piazza so every student can have that opportunity to learn from her classmates. Whether she’s too shy to ask, whether she’s working alone in her dorm room, or whether her few friends in her class don’t know the answer either.

I want Piazza to be a remedy for students who are not given the intellectual space, freedom, or support to fulfill their educational potential and desire for learning. And I want Piazza to empower instructors to have a positive, personal impact on more students.

Piazza is designed to connect students, TAs, and professors so every student can get help when she needs it — even at 2AM.

Again, the simplicity and student-focus is what made me say “yes” to the trial. The only repeat complaint I’ve had from students is about the quality of some the questions posted by their classmates and the fact that Piazzza is not an integral part of the overall course management tool. Both my students and I find huge benefit in the control they have over when and how they see questions.

Coursekit

The University of Pennsylvania is apparently feeling the same push by students to take control of their collaboration space. Coursekit is the result of frustration on the part of Wharton undergraduate Joseph Cohen (cofounder & CEO). From the Coursekit site:

We started Coursekit out of frustration with existing school software.

We’ve re-imagined what a class should look like online. We give instructors and students amazingly designed tools to manage their courses — gradebook, calendaring, file management — and we make it unbelievably easy to interact with one another.

We believe that there’s a lot more to class than lecture. Post links, videos, files. Start discussions. Write a blog post. Ask about an assignment. Classes are meant to be social, but they rarely are. We’re changing that.

There is much to be learned from the priorities of students with multiple courses (projects) functioning in self-managing teams. They aren’t looking for bells and whistles; they are looking to simplify and be effective. We can all learn from these students’ experiences and perspectives: Translate academic team project to basic team work, gradebook to performance appraisal, and you have a web working environment with needs similar to those of most organizations.

Take the students’ perspective for the moment — frankly, we are all students in this quickly-changing environment — how could simplification enhance your projects? What is the minimum viable product for your setting?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Harry Wood

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Diagramly: A Free Online Tool for Creating Diagrams and Charts

Diagramly: A Free Online Tool for Creating Diagrams and Charts: "

Looking for a tool to create diagrams, mind maps and flow charts? Diagramly is a capable online diagramming tool, and while it’s not quite as powerful as desktop apps like Microsoft Visio, it’s free and can produce fairly complex diagrams and charts — an impressive feat for a web app built entirely in HTML and JavaScript.

You don’t need to create an account or login to get started: just head to the Diagramly site. The bulk of the screen is taken up by a blank grid, where you’ll create your diagram. Along the left-hand side of the screen are palettes of shapes (rectangles, circles, connecting lines, arrows, etc.), BPM flowchart symbols, and clip art — to use these you just drag and drop them onto your grid, and then preposition and scale as required. At the top of the screen you’ll find tools for adjusting things like zoom level, text size, gradients and fills, and line color. There are also undo/redo, copy/paste and file open/save buttons at the top-left.

Once you’re happy with your diagram, you can save it locally (either in Diagramly’s native XML format, or as a PNG, JPG or SVG file). Unfortunately, there’s no option to save your diagram to the cloud, and you can’t collaborate in real-time with other Diagramly users, which would have been nice features to see. Cleverly, you can open Visio files using the app; if nothing else, Diagramly could prove handy for those times that people send you a Visio file and you don’t have it installed.

If you’ve used a desktop diagramming app like Visio, Diagramly will probably feel familiar. It does have some quirks that take a little getting used to: Some of the icons in the left-hand sidebar don’t really match the shapes produced, for example. However, while it’s not quite as polished as commercial desktop diagramming apps, it’s free, and with a little patience it’s capable of producing pretty decent results.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Is Email’s Reign Coming to an End?

Is Email’s Reign Coming to an End?: "

Two years ago, I wrote an article for GigaOM Pro entitled Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated (subscription required), in which I explained why email is such a useful tool and why I thought it was unlikely to be replaced as the primary business communications medium any time soon. In the time since then, however, we’ve seen a wave of newer cloud-based communications and collaboration products taking the enterprise by storm. Could email be overtaken by these?

While it’s been widely reported that teens no longer use email, it seems that attitudes to email are changing in workplace, too. According to a new GigaOM Pro report, The Future of Workplaces (subscription required), which surveyed 1,000 decision makers and end-users about the ways that workplaces are changing, workers don’t necessarily believe email will continue to be such a critical tool in the future:

Key Technologies: Future Use

The report’s authors highlight the fact that, while the respondents believed they would newer technologies like VoIP and videoconferencing increasingly in the future, the more traditional tools like email and the office landline showed a noticeable downward trend.

These findings shouldn’t be surprising; having a greater range of useful (and relatively inexpensive) communications tools at our disposal means we can pick the best tools for a given job, which should make our communications more effective. The availability of tools like Dropbox and box.net, for example, has greatly simplified the process of sharing files with others, and should mean fewer people trying to send large files as email attachments. And for internal office communications, social business tools like Yammer and Chatter make for easier conversation than can be had over email distribution lists. However, even though we now have a greater range of useful tools to call upon, I think email will continue to play a vital role in our business communications for the foreseeable future. It has advantages — such as being simple, asynchronous and virtually universal — that aren’t all shared by its newer competitors. Don’t expect to see it going the way of the dodo just yet.

For more insight on the way that our workplaces are changing, check out the full report over on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Image Source: GigaOM Pro

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Monday, March 28, 2011

The Basics of Video Editing: The Complete Guide [Night School]

Barbara Glenn has put together on a distance learning training module for the QEP. It will be available by next fall. Currently, there are six flip cameras faculty in HSS you can check out and then check out to students for video projects.

Why video projects in a writing course? You might be interested in teaching video in terms of multi-modal writing and/or the oral communication outcomes. Folks may also be interested in using video casts in their distance or hybrid teaching. In any event, this is the best comprehensive guide to video editing I've seen in quite a while, so I thought I'd disseminate it.

Steve

The Basics of Video Editing: The Complete Guide [Night School]: "

Last week we learned the basics of video editing, covering everything from the general workflow to special effects and color correction to a primer on encoding and delivery. Here's the complete guide with all the videos and notes in one convenient location.

These lessons concentrate primarily on editing video in Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro, but that doesn't mean they won't be helpful for other editing software. The idea behind having the lessons with both applications is to demonstrate that when you learn one editing application it's pretty easy to learn another. Most of the stuff is the same, and these lessons mainly concentrate on the sorts of things all video editing software can do. We'll get a little application-specific at times, but you'll get an idea of how different applications tackle the same problems. If you want to learn Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro, that's great, but if you'd prefer to learn other editing software you shouldn't feel like these lessons don't apply to you, too.